Page 100 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
Coach levels me with a look. Holds on for a moment, letting me know without a shadow of a doubt that this is the last time I’ll be welcome in his office if Everly is hurt again.
Understood.
He leans back, his expression shifting again. “You know, you’re just like him.”
I pause. “Who?”
Coach frowns as though the answer were obvious. “Your dad.”
The air changes. My father’s name is a weather event. It changes the conditions of whatever space it occupies.
“You know we played together in the minors for two seasons before I left for the NHL.” His voice drops—not coaching, remembering. “He was something. Played every game, heart full out.” He shakes his head. “When he was on the red line, he terrified me. I was a defenseman. He was a forward who hit like a freight train.”
I’m very still. He hasn’t really talked about my dad, ever.
“You know what I remember most? It wasn’t the hitting. Wasn’t the skating.” He leans forward. “After games. Win or lose. Didn’t matter if we’d just gone seven rounds and I had his elbow print on my ribs.”
“What did he do?”
“He found the pay phone.” Coach’s steadiness is costing him. “In the corridor outside the locker room. Before cell phones. Metal phone on the wall. And after every game—every single game—your father would find that phone. And call home.”
“He called Mom.”
“And you. I’d walk past him in the hallway, sometimes icing something he’d broken earlier that evening.” The complicated smile. “And I’d hear him say the same thing. Same words. Win or lose. This voice that was completely different from the ice voice. The ice voice was intimidation. The phone voice was—” He stops. Swallows. “The softest thing I’ve ever heard from a man who hit that hard.”
I can’t speak.
“He’d say, ‘I’m coming home,’” Coach says. Almost a whisper. “‘Tell Beck I love him.’”
I can’t breathe.
Tell Beck I love him.
Words I’ve never heard. Sitting in Coach Hart’s memory for thirty years, waiting for the moment his player needed them.
“He said that?” My voice is broken. My dad didn’t use that word, really. He showed it in showing up to practice. Teaching me puck handling skills. But this…what?
“Every game. Win or lose. Those exact words.”
“I didn’t know he did that.”
“I should have told you sooner. I thought you knew.”
“Why are you telling me now?”
“Because hockey was what your father did. It wasn’t who he was.” The specific, deliberate emphasis of a man who has been waiting for this conversation. “The man on the phone saying ‘Tell Beck I love him’—that was the real man. His real job. Everything else was a side hustle.”
And I’m trying to hear that through the layers I’ve built. Your father died for hockey, so hockey is sacred, and choosing anything over it dishonors the sacrifice.
That’s been my operating system for twenty-three years.
“He had both, Beckett. Hockey and love. And faith—oh, he had that in spades. And he lived them all out, trusting God.”
“But he died playing.”
“He died in a terrible accident. A freak play. He died during hockey. Not for hockey. There’s a difference. He was a man who made a living on the ice and died because the ice is dangerous, and sometimes dangerous things take the people we love.”
I don’t know what to say.
